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Session 25	Engendering Shifts
Constance Valis Hill	She Dances Like a Man’: The High-Heel, Low-Heel Controversy for Women in Tap
	Surely the most indelible image of the female tap dancer in the twentieth century has been the woman in the high-heeled shoe, and so has it been the most controversial. For the high-heeled shoe, which brings the dancer onto the balls of the feet to enhance the line and shape of the leg, is emblematic of the chorusline dancer who performed audibly-clear but simple steps, and was incapable of the rhythm-tapping virtuosity of her male peers. The high-heeled shoe is what women in the 1970s flatly rejected in favor of the low-heeled men’s oxford shoe, as it enabled them to perform the piston-driven steps of rhythm tap and earned them the most superlative of complements: “You dance like a man.” The high-heeled shoe is what women in the millennium have reclaimed by demonstrating their ability to execute all of the steps of the male dancer, only in high-heeled shoes, and thus dancing “as a woman.” I will examine the shifting politics of high- and low-heel controversy, the shifting strategies of “showing leg” (cutaway tuxedo) and “erasing leg” (full suit), of rising onto the balls of the feet and dropping the heels; and interrogate the notion of the “feminine” in tap dancing.
Andrea Deagon	The "Effeminate Dancer" in the Greco-Roman World: The Intimate Performance of Ambiguity
	In the cosmopolitan Greco-Roman world of the second and third centuries CE, the terms magodos, malakos, and kinaidos/cinaedus identified a category of performer usually described (inadequately) as the "effeminate dancer." This paper investigates the nature of the "effeminate dancer's" performance and his function in the various societies in which such entertainment is attested, ranging from the dance-negative environs of urban Rome to the diverse cultures of the Middle East and Asia Minor, in which there was arguably a longstanding tradition of such performers associated with religious cult. In a world where men typically played women's roles in mainstream drama and dance, the "effeminate dancer's" performance consciously broke these accepted conventions of theatrical illusion to create a space in which culturally vital distinctions of gender were challenged and moral ambiguities specifically enacted.
Catherine Cabeen	Female Power and Gender Transcendence in the Work of Martha Graham and Mary Wigman
	This paper contrasts the iconic embodiments of empowered femininity characteristic of Martha Graham’s choreographic work, and the gender ambiguity found in Mary Wigman’s early solo concerts. These modern dance pioneers both emancipated the female body from dominant Western culture’s insistence on binary gender definitions. However, their differing approaches to how a liberated female body looks, moves, and dresses, provides an opportunity to examine modern dance as a forum for diverse shifts in gender representation. This research draws on my personal experience dancing with the Martha Graham Dance Company and historic research investigating Wigman’s early solo concerts in Germany from 1917-1919. This paper makes the claim that modern dance, as a conscious fusion of the body and mind, can embrace the fluid complexity of personal identity and encourage both conceptual and embodied transcendence of hegemonic male/female paradigms.
	Constance Valis Hill is a jazz dancer, choreographer, and dance scholar whose articles have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, and Studies in Dance History; and in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance (2001) and Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (2008). Her book, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000) received the Deems Taylor ASCAP Award. She received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 Rockefeller research fellowship to write a twentieth-century cultural history of tap dance in America. She is a Five College Professor of Dance Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
	Andrea Deagon received her Ph.D. in Classical studies from Duke University in 1984, and she currently coordinates the Classical Studies program at UNC-Wilmington, as well as teaching in the Women's Studies porgram. Since 1975 she has studied, taught and performed Middle Eastern dance. Her articles on dance history and interpretation have appeared in various dance and academic publications.
	Catherine Cabeen is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington. She was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1998 - 2005. Cabeen has also been a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Pearl Lang Dance Theater, Richard Move’s MoveOpolis! and his Martha@... series. Cabeen’s choreography has been commissioned by the 92nd St. Y, Aaron Davis Hall, American College Dance Festival NW, and On the Board’s Northwest New Works Festival. Catherine is responsible for the 2007-08 restagings of D-Man in The Waters for BTJ/AZ at SUNY Purchase and the University of Illinois.
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